Shulou(Shulou.com)06/03 Report--

Here comes K3s, the lightest open source Kubernetes distribution in history! Meet the emerging usage scenarios of Kubernetes on edge computing and IoT devices.

On February 26th, 2019, Rancher Labs (hereinafter referred to as Rancher), a leading provider of container management software, announced the release of lightweight Kubernetes release K3s, which is designed for R & D and operation personnel running Kubernetes in a resource-constrained environment. The K3s project released by Rancher will meet the growing demand for small, easy-to-manage Kubernetes clusters running on x86, ARM64, and ARMv7 processors in edge computing environments.

"existing Kubernetes distributions are usually memory-intensive and too complex in edge computing environments." Liang Sheng, co-founder and CEO of Rancher, said: "in the past year, dozens of corporate customers who have partnered with Rancher have expressed to us that they think Kubernetes is an ideal platform for managing edge infrastructure, but they are not willing to invest a lot of resources in their edge devices to run a mature Kubernetes platform. With K3s, we can provide these teams with a Kubernetes distribution smaller than 512MB RAM, which is very suitable for use cases of edge computing. Retail, financial, telecommunications, utility and manufacturing enterprises will have a very large demand for K3s. "

How to reduce the size of Kubernetes by K3s

To reduce the memory required to run Kubernetes, the Rancher K3s development team focused on the following four major changes:

Remove old, non-essential code: K3s does not include any Alpha features that are disabled by default or outdated features, and the original API components are still running in standard deployments. In addition, Rancher removes all non-default license controllers, in- tree cloud providers and storage drivers, but allows users to add any drivers they need.

Integrate running packaging processes: to save RAM,Rancher, merge multiple processes that typically run on the Kubernetes management server into a single process. Rancher also combines the kubelet, kubeproxy, and flannel agent processes running on the worker node into a single process.

Using containerd instead of Docker as the runtime container engine: by replacing Docker,Rancher with containderd, you can significantly reduce runtime footprint and remove features such as libnetwork, swarm, Docker storage drivers, and other plug-ins.

In addition to etcd, SQLite is introduced as an optional data store: Rancher adds SQLite as an optional data store in K3s, providing a lightweight alternative to etcd. This scheme not only takes up less memory, but also greatly simplifies the operation.

Push Kubernetes to land in the edge computing scene

With the development trend of marginal deployment of Kubernetes, the number of Kubernetes clusters that enterprises need to manage by operation and maintenance is increasing rapidly. In many of the most interesting edge computing use cases, organizations will run thousands of Kubernetes clusters with only one, two, or three nodes, and operators will be responsible for managing such a large-scale infrastructure, and K3s is created to minimize the installation and operation experience of users. The main features of K3s include:

Production Kubernetes:K3s is a standard Kubernetes distribution that has been officially certified by CNCF.

A binaries without host dependencies: everything you need to install Kubernetes on any device is contained in the binaries of this 40MB, without the need for external installers like KuberSpray, KubeADM, or RKE. Users can configure or upgrade a single-node K3s cluster with only one command.

A command to add nodes to the cluster: if you want to add other nodes to the cluster, the administrator only needs to run a command on the new node to point to the original server and pass it through secure token.

Automatically generate certificates: when the cluster starts, all certificates required to establish a TLS between the Kubernetes master server and the node are automatically created, as well as the encryption key for the service account.

Rancher also released K3s that supports x86room64, ARM64, and ARMv7 architectures, giving K3s more flexibility to work across any edge infrastructure. In addition to the use scenario of edge computing, K3s is also ideal for users looking for an easy way to deploy a lightweight distribution of Kubernetes. During early technology previews, many users reported that K3s was particularly helpful for CI/CD environments, embedded systems, and local Kubernetes deployments.

The four major usage scenarios of K3s are:

Edge computing

Use with application binding

Embedded device

CI environment

"We have more than 30000 wind turbines in production, and we are excited and excited about K3s because it means we will be able to deploy Kubernetes clusters in thousands of edge computing locations." Zhang Wei, deputy general manager of Jin Feng Huineng Technology, the world's second largest wind turbine manufacturer.

K3s, what the industry needs

Arm has been working to build a next-generation cloud-to-edge infrastructure while working closely with partners to achieve further innovation. Our ongoing collaboration with Rancher, a leader in Kubernetes innovation, is a testament to the progress made by the cloud native container ecosystem in supporting cloud data center and edge use cases based on the Arm Neoverse ™platform.

-- Kevin Ryan, Senior Director of Arm Infrastructure Software ecosystem Development

Kubernetes is not only the most popular platform for controlling centralized cloud workloads, but it is also increasingly centrally managing many applications in a wide variety of environments. Rancher's K3s project addresses a huge challenge by extending the benefits of Kubernetes to edge computing by reducing its resource footprint while providing the same production-level experience. Salute to the Rancher team! They led the cloud's' ubiquitous' charge.

-- Packer CEO Zac Smith

We have long been aware of the need for more and more enterprises to deploy Kubernetes's distributed applications to the edge. This time, the release of Rancher K3s, which supports Hivecell hardware, will make production-level workloads possible in an unattended, resource-constrained remote Internet of things environment. Ricker Lyman Robotic's team is happy to work with Rancher!

-- Ricker Lyman Robotic CEO Jeffrey Ricker

Everything is open source, welcome to use

The home page of the K3s official website is now online, you can visit https://k3s.io to learn more about the K3s project.

At the same time, you are welcome to download, install and use K3s through GitHub https://github.com/rancher/k3s.

Enterprises that need assistance in deploying and managing K3s please contact info@rancher.com by email.

About Rancher Labs

Founded by Silicon Valley cloud computing leader Liang Sheng, the father of CloudStack, Rancher Labs is committed to creating innovative open source software to help enterprises run containers and Kubernetes in a production environment. The flagship product Rancher is an open source enterprise Kubernetes platform that is the first and only platform in the industry that can manage all clouds, all distributions, and all Kubernetes clusters. It solves the difficulties of different infrastructure that enterprise users may face in the production environment, and improves the poor ease of use of Kubernetes native UI and the steep learning curve, which is the best choice for enterprises to land Kubernetes.

Rancher has more than 100 million downloads worldwide and more than 20000 corporate customers. Global famous companies such as China Life Insurance, Huawei, Ping an of China, Minsheng Bank, Industrial Bank, SAIC, Haier, Michelin, Trina, Toyota, Honda, Honeywell, Jinfeng, PricewaterhouseCoopers, Hainan Airlines, Xiamen Airlines, Evergrande, China Pacific, BNP Paribas, Bank of America, HSCIS Hang Seng Index, China Water Conservancy, Blizzard, CCTV and so on are all paying customers of Rancher.

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